Would love to hear thoughts on Knowledge Management Software
What do you use? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it?
I’m responsible for our content production at TextExpander, which also means organizing where everything lives and coordinating with teams providing information for that content. Our primary platforms are:
Notion: We switched over to Notion from Asana pretty recently, and it’s quickly become our Swiss Army Knife for internal knowledge and project management. It’s a note-taking app, it’s a wiki, it’s a calendar, it’s a word processor, it’s whatever you need it to be. The downside of the flexibility is that it can be confusing to figure out how to do things and there can be so many options it’s paralyzing, or you screw something up. It’s almost like the UNIX of note apps.
Miro: Miro is a whiteboard and diagramming tool that we use to outline big projects. It’s good for things like mass brainstorming, which is what it’s made for, but I it doesn’t have the larger design capabilities of Figma or the strong search capabilities of Notion. It’s a good place to start, but I don’t love final documentation living there.
TextExpander: Most people probably don’t think of TextExpander as a knowledge management app, but a lot of support teams (including ours) use shared Snippets as a single source of truth for common customer concerns. The nice thing is that you can expand the answer directly into whatever you’re writing, so no need for copy and paste.
Evernote — I stick everything in this, and I really ought to separate it into “life” and “work” piles, but it’s been such a “soup” (I guess that’s the right word for it) for so long, it’s hard to imagine another product taking it’s place. Maybe Apple Notes, but it’s not quite there yet.
Email — Spark mail for personal stuff; Outlook for work stuff (I know, I know…).
Microsoft Teams — ugh… and don’t get me started on the name.
Paper — I’ve been going analog a lot lately. Scribbling things down in a notebook I take everywhere has been a real game-changer. Especially when carried in a case that has plenty of pockets to stash stuff (keys, receipts, the occasional USB-C cord).
Tasks — I oscillate between Things and OmniFocus, because I cannot stay still apparently…
KMS is a buzz phrase that gets turned into “singular apps” in my experience, since I started looking at them when I ran program operations for a NASA HQ office in the '90s. I talked to a few experts at Northwestern U and put some thought into it and I was able to cobble together a dashboard that extracted program and project information from our research activities. Our research programs and projects across five Centers got to use their preferred tools and I could get key data to capture status and plans. The point was it’s not the app, it’s the way you understand the knowledge that you’re trying to manage.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m not looking at enterprise KMS anymore, I’m looking at how I manage my knowledge, and the systems I need to integrate and use on a daily basis. And I need to have access on my Macs, iPhone and iPad. So I have several systems:
todo: cultured code’s Things
Calendar: Apple’s Calendar
Email: Apple’s Mail
Journaling and notes: Evernote
I make a daily journal for personal and business. Each one is its own journal. I generate each journal in Agile Tortoise’s Drafts. It scans my personal todos from things and my personal events from calendar and makes a note that is sent to Evernote for the day. I add to each journal through Evernote and update the times I log on business, and update my personal stuff to that journal. Things that I capture in Evernote get linked to an event in the respective journal or lives on its own. For my business journal I do daily client time logging, and at the end of the week, I do a weekly report that crawls through my daily business journals for that week.
And, yes, TextExpander is part of my toolset. An integral piece, in fact.
That’s worked like a charm for me ever since I got my iPhone 3G in 2008 till now.
When I get on-device LLM, I’m looking to apply it to my Evernote journals. I can’t use the LLMs on the web, because of IP and client propriety.
I’m app agnostic. TextExpander is central to my worfklow.
I manage files: Markdown files, PDF Files, Emails
Markdown files: Notebooks, Obsidian, iA Writer, Textastic, Working Copy – I use all of them.
PDFs: They live in Dropbox and I access them there, in Notebooks, PDF Expert, PDF Viewer, and Adobe
Mail: Apple Mail and Spark
Todo’s: Still open to ideas! I’m testing the Tasks plugin in Obsidian right now. I like Todo+ and keep returning to it, but I’m looking for a way to keep tasks in Markdown and linked to my writing.
TextExpander is essential to my workflow. It houses some templates that I rely on. But I also use it every day to transform Markdown from one flavor to another. For example, a few days ago, I wrote a JavaScript snippet that converts inline Markdown footnotes to reference footnotes. The script is smart enough to preserve reference footnotes and convert inline ones. This is one of many text transformation scripts that I use every day.
I actually have a master TextExpander script that I run that “reads the YAML” and makes various transformations. It is like magic. I write a few instructions in my documents, copy the text to the clipboard, type ,run, and TextExpander “bends text” to my wishes.
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